In this Newbery Honor Book for readers 9 to 12, set in 1899 Texas, 11-year-old Calpurnia Virginia Tate doesn't care about needlepoint or cooking; she wonders instead why the yellow grasshoppers in her Texas backyard are so much bigger than the green ones. As Callie's curiosity leads her to explore the world around her, she develops a close relationship with her naturalist grandfather, navigates the hazards of living with six brothers, and comes up against just what it means to be a girl at the turn of the 20th century. The New Yorker joined such newspapers as the Washington Post and the New York Times in cheering Jacqueline Kelly's debut, calling it "the most delightful historical novel for tweens in many, many years.... Callie's struggles to find a place in the world where she'll be encouraged in the gawky joys of intellectual curiosity are fresh, funny, and poignant today."

"In her debut novel, Jacqueline Kelly brings to vivid life a boisterous small-town family at the dawn of a new century. And she especially shines in her depiction of the natural world that so intrigues Callie.... Readers will want to crank up the A.C. before cracking the cover, though. That first chapter packs a lot of summer heat."—Washington Post

"Each chapter of this winning ... novel opens with a quotation from On the Origin of Species—a forbidden book that her own grandfather turns out to have hidden away. Together they study Darwin's masterpiece, leading to a revolution in Callie's ideas of what she might accomplish on her own."—NYTBR